This 1 Quality Will Help You Out-Perform Everybody Else

I try not to write many of these, but in the case of this article, it’s completely needed.

Don’t crucify me yet..

You need to hear what I’m about to say.

Hard Work Is Not The Quality

Over the last three years since college graduation I’ve put in an insane amount of hard work.

I’m not exactly sure why I felt driven to do so.

While everybody else enjoyed their leisure time (more power to them), I wrote blog posts. I figured out how to work Wordpress. I understood how to create an email opt-in form.

But hard work didn’t help me do any of that.

Perseverance Is Not The Quality

Hard work is all fun and games until you burn yourself out. Anybody can work hard for 20 minutes.

What happens at the end of that 20 minutes when you get bored and stressed out?

You must persevere.

But, my friends, perseverance wasn’t the reason I built up my audience of 17,000 here on Medium.

Not even close.

Brilliance Is Not The Quality

Are you kidding me? Have you heard me speak? I can barely talk in coherent sentences without stumbling over myself every five seconds (shout out to my students who put up with this).

I am not brilliant.

I’m not even that smart.

I know what I know because of one simple quality..

This quality has helped me reach incredible heights, like getting featured in a viral video that’s nearing a million views on Facebook (fingers crossed).

This quality is what I owe all my success to.

Are you ready for it?

I’m going to give you a word that’s not nearly as sexy as “brilliance,” or “perseverance,” or “hard-work.”

But this one quality was worth far more to me than any other quality I learned to possess over time..

Initiative.

Fucking INITIATIVE.

Figure This Sh*t Out On Your Own Already

This is something I touched on for a moment in my previous article, but I’m ready to re-visit it now for an entire piece.

How did I understand how to start a blog, or make my site faster, or travel around the country for 5 straight months?

I googled.

I googled more.

Then I googled even more.

I spent hours staring at a computer screen with bloodshot eyes.

I listened to videos as I drove to the grocery store.

You want to know how many questions I asked of other influencers out there who I wanted to emulate?

Doughnut.

0.

Nada.

Zilch.

I almost wonder why I even have to write this article. There is a wealth of information online the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Gary Vee said something recently that floored me.

I’m paraphrasing, but I believe he said there’s more information being created on the internet each day RIGHT NOW than there was in all of human history up until 2000 or something.

Let that rattle around in your mind for a moment.

Let Me Get One Thing Straight, Though

I’m not opposed to people asking questions. I love getting questions from ya’ll. I try to answer everybody who asks them of me (and I don’t think you’re stupid for asking).

But I do think some of you need to have more initiative. It’s okay if you didn’t know something. But I think it’s not okay when you start relying on everybody else to give you the answers too much.

The truth is, in this day and age, the only person you need to rely on for the answers is yourself.

And that’s me trying to help you win.

You can either wait 24 hours for me to email you back, or you can be ten steps ahead because you figured out the answer to your first question, then the next question, then the next question from Google.

There’s so many people on the internet that are smarter than me and have been in this game longer.

You can cut out the middle man and get the answers from a piece of content they wrote, or from a video they put out.

I promise you, you can.

Initiative Is What I’ll Build My Empire On

Assuming I’ll ever build an online empire.

I will continue doing this. Figuring it out for myself.

Reading, listening, and even writing to cement that knowledge.

I want to break into YouTube in 2018. You know how I’ll do that? I’ll either take an online course (where it’s much more okay to ask questions), or I’ll research the hell out of it for 40 hours and emerge enlightened.

I won’t ask anybody any questions. I’ll get from point A to point Y overnight instead of Point A to Point B.

You see what I’m saying?

Trust in yourself.

Take initiative, and you’ll be able to outperform everybody else. Because everybody else is asking a billion questions, too.

Stand out!

Want to get started writing online? I actually have a free 5-day email course called “Your First 1,000 Medium Followers” that will teach you how to build an audience here on Medium! Sign up for it right here. I’d love to teach you a couple things.